DARK AGES AMERICA

This is the Blog for MORRIS BERMAN, the author of "Dark Ages America". It includes current publications and random thoughts about U.S. Foreign Policy, including letters and reactions to publications from others.
A cultural historian and social critic, MORRIS BERMAN is the author of "Wandering God" and "The Twilight of American Culture". Since 2003 he has been a visiting professor in sociology at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
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June 16, 2018

The Horror Show

Wafers-
I’ve been thinking recently about how Americans need to be punished for
the way of life they have led, encouraged, and sought to spread around the
world. The problem is that the punishment is more or less wasted, since
Americans are clueless regarding that way of life—defined by “What’s In It
For Me?” They haven’t the faintest notion that they may have done
something wrong, let alone inhuman.
Here’s a real-life example; you may be able to find the tape of this on
YouTube. It was roughly fifteen years ago; I remember the date was July 1st .
What was recorded by the security camera in some hospital in Brooklyn, in
a small waiting room, were two women sitting on opposite sides of the room.
What we see is one of the women sliding off of her chair and onto the floor,
unconscious. The other woman dully looks on at this; she has no visible
emotional reaction. Occasionally, a nurse or hospital staff member looks in,
sees the woman on the floor, does nothing, and moves on. It took the woman
thirty minutes to die; literally no one gave a damn. Later, there was some
sort of internal investigation into staff negligence; I assume it came to
nothing.
I often thought of wanting to interview the other woman in the room, ask
her: “What were you thinking, when you saw this woman collapse onto the
floor?” I suspect the answer would be “Nothing. Nothing at all.” But here is
where the punishment comes in. When this woman herself kicks the bucket,
who will be observing her, and also thinking of nothing? If you treat people
like zeroes, eventually you’ll be treated like one yourself. This is a pretty
good description of social interaction in the US today. Since the American
philosophy of life can be captured in phrases such as “Not my problem,” or
“There is no free lunch,” a large fraction of the American public is miserable
and lonely. The stats of opioid use, alcoholism, TV and cell phone addiction,
workaholism, suicide, prescription drug use, obesity—anything to sedate the
pain of loneliness, anxiety, and depression—are through the roof. But Americans
are not very bright, so they don’t connect the dots. They simply don’t get it,
that if you treat others like shit, others will treat you in the same manner,
and you’ll feel like shit most of the time, as a result. You think this is
coming from the outside? Think again.
James Baldwin once wrote that the problem with nasty people getting their
karma is that they don’t really recognize it, so the message is basically
wasted on them. Consider, he says, a man who is emotionally dead. His karma
is that there is no love in his life; not much of anything, really. But
because he is emotionally dead, he can’t be made to see that very fact. So
he lives out this awful karma in an ignorant fog. This describes a huge
segment of the American population, maybe most.​
I remember once, many years ago, getting a massage, and for some reason
saying to the masseuse: “I’ll probably die surrounded by my books.”
Horrible fate, and had I stayed in the US, it would have been mine. I had
very few real friends in the US, very few people I could really trust or
talk to. My situation now is the complete opposite ofthat. Of course, I
never expected to float out into the Great Beyond speakingSpanish, but life
is funny that way. The more important point is that I’ll be surrounded by
close friends, by people who love me, not by a pile of books. And this is
the reality for most Mexicans as well, I’m quite sure: it’s the nature of
this society. What a horror show the United States is; what an absolute,
unconscious, horror show.
-mb

About Me

Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. During 1982-88 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Berman won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, the Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992, and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (from the Media Ecology Association) in 2013. He is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness–-The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)–and in 2000 his Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review. Dr. Berman relocated to Mexico in 2006, and during 2008-9 was a Visiting Professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City.